A recent analyst report out of the UK highlights that not-so-hidden secret about enterprise software: significant portions of the functionality of many implementations are underutilized (read the report here). Surprised? You shouldn’t be: significant portions of every piece of software basically lie fallow. Excessive, unused features, many would say, are part of the price of using enterprise software.

Yeah, last year I questioned whether we even need relational databases for new applications. It is gratifying to see analysts start to sit up and notice that applications like SAP don’t even use the most advanced features in Oracle’s flagship database offering, or from any other vendor either… yet customers are still paying for those features even though they don’t get any value from them.
If I was to put money in a deal, I’d be looking at XML storage and stream processing engines. BTW, Streambase is built on top of Sleepycat’s BerkeleyDB is memory serves me correctly.